Category: Birthdays

… was born New York City on this date in 1894.

Visit the Norman Rockwell Museum.

Today is the birthday

… of Carol Channing. Broadway’s Dolly Gallagher Levi is 87.

… of Jean Simmons. The actress (The Robe, Spartacus, Elmer Gantry) is 79. Miss Simmons was twice nominated for an Oscar; Hamlet (supporting) and The Happy Ending (leading).

… of Ernie Banks. The baseball hall-of-famer is 77. Let’s play two.

… of composer Philip Glass. He’s 71.

The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed “minimalism.” Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.” Much of his early work was based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry. Or, to put it another way, it immersed a listener in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds, develops.

Philip Glass: Biography

… of Queen Beatrix. She’s 70. Do you know what country is she queen of?

… of Nolan Ryan. The baseball hall-of-famer is 61.

… of KC. He’s 57. And his band was?

Minnie Driver is 38. Justin Timberlake is 27.

Suzanne Pleshette, Emily on the ”The Bob Newhart Show” and Annie (the teacher) in The Birds, would have been 71 today.

Norman Mailer was born on the last day of January in 1923. Here’s what NewMexiKen posted before on Mailer’s birthday.

Thomas Merton was born on this date in 1915. Here’s a previous entry for Merton.

John O’Hara was born on this date in 1905.

[O’Hara] went on to become one of the most popular serious writers of his lifetime, writing many best-selling novels, including Appointment in Samarra (1934) and A Rage to Live (1949). Most critics consider his best work to be his short stories, which were published as the Collected Stories of John O’Hara (1984). He holds the record for the greatest number of short stories published by a single author in The New Yorker magazine.

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

And Pearl Zane Grey, the first American millionaire author, was born on this date in 1872. Here’s a previous entry on Grey.

Today is the birthday

… of Gene Hackman. The Oscar-winning actor is 78. He won Best Actor for The French Connection and Best Actor in a Supporting Role for The Unforgiven. He has received three other nominations.

… of Vanessa Redgrave. The six-time Oscar nominee, one-time winner (for Julia), is 71.

… of Dick Cheney. The Vice President is 67. Well past retirement age.

… of Phil Collins. Something in the Air Tonight is 57.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on this date in 1882.

First of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

Today is the birthday

… of Katharine Ross. Mrs. Robinson’s daughter is 68.

… of Tom Selleck. Thomas Magnum is 63. He’s much older than me, you know.

… of Oprah Winfrey. She’s 54.

… of Judy Norton Taylor. Mary Ellen Walton is 50. (Which makes her five years older than Patricia Neal was when playing the mother in the original Walton film, The Homecoming: A Christmas Story. And a whole lot older than Michael Learned was when she became the Walton mom in the TV series. Learned was just 33.)

… of actor Edward Burns. He’s 40.

… of Sara Gilbert. Darlene Conner on “Roseanne” is 33.

… of blues singer Jonny Lang, all of 27.

Edward Abbey was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania, on this date in 1927. The Writer’s Almanac had this in 2005:

In 1956 he began working as a park ranger and a fire lookout for the National Park Service. He worked there for fifteen years, and this led him to write about the wilderness of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. He said, “For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!” His book Desert Solitaire (1968) is about his time working as a ranger in Arches National Park, Utah. In it he argues for, among other things, a ban on cars in wilderness preserves. In a memorial piece about Abbey, Edward Hoagland says of him, “Personally, he was a labyrinth of anger and generosity, shy but arresting because of his mixture of hillbilly and cowboy qualities, and even when silent he appeared bigger than life.”

NewMexiKen gathered these Abbey quotations:

If you’re never ridden a fast horse at a dead run across a desert valley at dawn, be of good cheer: You’ve only missed out on one half of life.

The indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial.

I have written much about many good places. But the best places of all, I have never mentioned.

In all of nature, there is no sound more pleasing than that of a hungry animal at its feed. Unless you are the food.

Phoenix, Arizona: an oasis of ugliness in the midst of a beautiful wasteland.

The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.

Edward Abbey died in 1989.

William Claude Dukenfield, better known as W.C. Fields, was born in Philadelphia on this date in 1880 or 1889.

A thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.

Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.

I always keep a supply of stimulant handy in case I see a snake–which I also keep handy.

I never vote for anyone; I always vote against.

Last week, I went to Philadelphia, but it was closed.

A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money.

A woman drove me to drink and I didn’t even have the decency to thank her.

Anyone who hates children and animals can’t be all bad.

I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.

I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to the food.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it.

If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull.

Some things are better than sex, and some are worse, but there’s nothing exactly like it.

There comes a time in the affairs of man when he must take the bull by the tail and face the situation.

(When “caught” reading a Bible) “Just looking for loopholes.”

Fields died on Christmas Day 1946.

Today is the birthday

… of Alan Alda. He’s 72.

… of Barbie Benton. Hugh Hefner’s one-time main squeeze is 58.

… of Sarah McLachlan. She’s 40.

… of Bilbo Baggins. Elijah Wood is 27.

Lucien B. Maxwell sold the “Maxwell Land Grant” for $1,350,000 on this date in 1870. The grant was more than 1.7 million acres, the largest tract of privately owned land in the Western Hemisphere. (Source: New Mexico Magazine)

Jackson Pollock was born on this date in 1912. Click image for larger version.

In 1929, Pollock began studying under Thomas Hart Benton, the realist mural painter, at Manhattan’s Art Students League. Pollock said, “He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.” Pollock became deeply influenced by Pablo Picasso’s work and the work of other surrealist painters, and this led Pollock to experiment with his painting. He developed the “drip” technique, where he would draw or drip paint onto enormous canvases. Sometimes he applied paint directly from the tube, and other times he used aluminum paint to make his work more brilliant. He was so energetic in his attacks on the canvas that his approach to painting became known as “action painting.”

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded moments after takeoff on this date in 1986. Read about it from The New York Times.

Chief Justice John Roberts is just 53 today.

The actor James Cromwell is 68. Among his many roles, Cromwell was the farmer in Babe. The role earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor. Who was the lead in that film — the pig?

Mikhail Baryshnikov is 60.

Sultry-voiced Margo Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies is 47.

Peter Fonda’s daughter Bridget is 44.

Jerome Kern was born on this date in 1885.

Kern and his wife returned to America, where he enhanced the scores of European musicals and worked as a rehearsal pianist. Then he met Oscar Hammerstein II, who became a lifelong friend, and the two collaborated on Show Boat in 1927. This musical gave us the songs “Ol’ Man River” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man.” In 1933, Kern and Hammerstein produced Roberta, which included the famous song “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.”

Kern moved to Hollywood in 1935, and he enjoyed success there. He wrote “The Way You Look Tonight” for the movie Swing Time, and the song won an Academy Award. In 1941, Kern and Hammerstein wrote “The Last Time I Saw Paris” because Paris had just been occupied by Nazi Germany, and that song also won an Academy Award.

Kern died in 1945 with Hammerstein at his side. At the memorial service, Hammerstein said of his friend Jerome Kern, “He stimulated everyone. He annoyed some. He never bored anyone at any time.”

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

Paul Newman is 83 years old today.

Newman has been nominated for the Best Actor in a Leading Role Oscar eight times, winning for The Color of Money in 1986, but not for Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, The Hustler, Hud, Cool Hand Luke, Absence of Malice, The Verdict, or Nobody’s Fool. He was also nominated for the Best Supporting Actor for Road to Perdition (at age 78).

Scott Glenn is 67.

One-time Oscar nominee David Strathairn is 59.

Lucinda Williams is 55.

Eddie Van Halen is 53 (going on 153).

Ellen DeGeneres is 50.

Wayne Gretzky is 47.

Julia Morgan was born in San Francisco on January 26, 1872.

Miss Morgan was one of the first women to graduate from University of California at Berkeley with a degree in civil engineering. During her tenure at Berkeley, Morgan developed a keen interest in architecture which is thought to have been fostered by her mother’s cousin, Pierre Le Brun, who designed the Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower in New York City. At Berkeley one of her instructors, Bernard Maybeck, encouraged her to pursue her architectural studies in Paris at the Ecole Nationale et Speciale des Beaux-Arts.

Arriving in Paris in 1896, she was initially refused admission because the Ecole had never before admitted a woman. After a two-year wait, Julia Morgan gained entrance to the prestigious program and became the first woman to receive a certificate in architecture. While in Paris, Morgan also found a mentor in her professor, Bernard Chaussemiche, for whom she worked as a drafter.

Soon after her graduation from the Ecole, Julia Morgan returned to her native San Francisco and began working for architect John Galen Howard. At the time Howard was the supervising architect of the University of California’s Master Plan, the commission of which he won by default from Phoebe Apperson Hearst. Morgan worked on the Master Plan drawing the elevations and designing the decorative details for the Mining Building built in memory of George Hearst. During this time Morgan also designed the Hearst Greek Theater on the Berkeley campus.
…

Over the course of the next 28 years, Morgan supervised nearly every aspect of construction at Hearst Castle including the purchase of everything from Spanish antiquities to Icelandic Moss to reindeer for the Castle’s zoo. She personally designed most of the structures, grounds, pools, animal shelters and workers’ camp down to the minutest detail. Additionally, Morgan worked closely with Hearst to integrate his vast art collection into the structures and grounds at San Simeon. She also worked on projects for Hearst’s other properties including Jolon, Wyntoon, Babicore, the “Hopi” residence at the Grand Canyon, the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Memorial Gymnasium at Berkeley, the Los Angeles Examiner Building, several of his Beverly Hills residences and Marion Davies’ beach house in Santa Monica.

Hearst Castle

The most overrated — especially by himself — person in American history was born on this date in 1880. That’s Douglas MacArthur.

Oscar-winner Ernest Borgnine (McHale’s Navy) is 91 today. Borgnine won the best actor Oscar in 1956 for the lead in Marty. The film also won best picture, director and screenplay (Paddy Chayefsky).

Oral Roberts is 90. Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die.

Ray Stevens is 69.

One of the most popular novelty artists of all time, Ray Stevens enjoyed a remarkably long career, with a stretch of charting singles — some of them major hits — that spanned four decades. Unlike parody king Weird Al Yankovic, Stevens made most of his impact with original material, often based on cultural trends of the day. Yet his knack for sheer silliness translated across generations, not to mention countless compilations and special TV offers. Stevens was a legitimately skilled singer and producer who also performed straight country and pop, scoring the occasional serious hit. But in general, comic novelty songs were his bread and butter, and his brand of humor somehow managed to endure seismic shifts in popular taste and style.

allmusic

Neil Diamond is 67, as is Aaron Neville.

Mary Lou Retton is 40. Ed Helms is 34. Mischa Barton is 22.

Edith Wharton was born on January 24th in 1862. This is from her obituary in 1937.

John Belushi should have been 59 today.

Edith Wharton was the child as well as the author of the Age of Innocence. In her seventy-five years of life she published thirty-eight books, including that great love story, “Ethan Frome.” But her reputation rested mostly upon her achievement as the chronicler of Fifth Avenue, when the brownstone front hid wealth and dignity at its ease upon the antimacassar-covered plush chairs of the Brown Decade.

The New York Times

Today is the birthday

… of actress Jeanne Moreau. She’s 80. Moreau is best known for French New Wave films Jules and Jim (1962) and The Bride Wore Black (1968). Roger Ebert:

This is ridiculous, I told myself. You’ve interviewed Ingmar Bergman. Robert Mitchum. John Wayne. You got through those okay. Why should you be scared of Jeanne Moreau? Simply because she’s the greatest movie actress of the last 20 years? Simply because she’s made more good films for great directors than anybody else? Simply because something in her face and manner has fascinated you since you sat through “Jules and Jim” twice in a row? She’s only human; it’s not like she’s a goddess.

But I suspected that she was.

… of Princess Caroline of Monaco, 51.

… of Mariska Hargitay. Jayne Mansfield’s daughter is 44. (She was in the car when her mother was killed in 1967.) Ms. Hargitay plays Detective Olivia Benson on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

It’s the birthday of Humphrey Bogart, born on this day in 1899. Bogart was nominated for the best actor Oscar for Casablanca, The Caine Mutiny and The African Queen; he won for The African Queen. According to The Writer’s Almanac:

[Bogart] was expelled from Massachusetts’ Phillips Academy and immediately joined the Navy to fight in World War I, serving as a ship’s gunner. One day, while roughhousing on the ship’s wooden stairway, he tripped and fell, and a splinter became lodged in his upper lip; the result was a scar, as well as partial paralysis of the lip, resulting in the tight-set mouth and lisp that became one of his most distinctive onscreen qualities.

And, born on this date in 1910, was Django Reinhardt. the first significant jazz figure in Europe — and the most influential European in jazz to this day. Play Jazz Guitar.com has some interesting background:

A violinist first and a guitarist later, Jean Baptiste “Django” Reinhardt grew up in a gypsy camp near Paris where he absorbed the gypsy strain into his music. A disastrous caravan fire in 1928 badly burned his left hand, depriving him of the use of the fourth and fifth fingers, but the resourceful Reinhardt figured out a novel fingering system to get around the problem that probably accounts for some of the originality of his style. According to one story, during his recovery period, Reinhardt was introduced to American jazz when he found a 78 RPM disc of Louis Armstrong’s “Dallas Blues” at an Orleans flea market. He then resumed his career playing in Parisian cafes until one day in 1934 when Hot Club chief Pierre Nourry proposed the idea of an all-string band to Reinhardt and Grappelli. Thus was born the Quintet of the Hot Club of France, which quickly became an international draw thanks to a long, splendid series of Ultraphone, Decca and HMV recordings.

The Red Hot Jazz Archive has some on-line recordings of the Quintette of the Hot Club of France.

Edouard Manet, an artist whose works include both the Realist and Impressionist traditions of 19th-century France, was born on this date in 1832. Click here to view Manet’s painting “On the Beach” (1873) and here for his painting of Monet in his floating studio (1874).

Today is the birthday

… of Jean Stapleton. Edith Bunker is 85. She won three Emmys and two Golden Globes in that role.

… of Tippi Hedren. The actress in Hitchcock’s The Birds is 78.

… of Phil Everly. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee (with older brother Don) is 69.

Phil and Don transformed the Appalachian folk, bluegrass and country sounds of their Kentucky boyhood into a richly harmonized form of rock and roll. The sons of entertainers Margaret and Ike Everly, a traveling country and western team, the Everly Brothers performed as part of the family act on radio and in concert. On their own, they sang beguilingly of adolescent romance in crisp, shimmering voices. With Don taking the melody and Phil harmonizing above him, the Everlys released a steady string of hit records between 1957-1962 that crossed over from country to pop and even R&B charts. (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame)

… of Shelley Fabares. Donna Reed’s television daughter is 64.

… of Dolly Parton. She’s 62.

With their strong feminine stances in the 1960s and 1970s, Dolly Rebecca Parton, along with fellow female pioneers Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette, revolutionized the world of country music for women performers. Then Parton took her crusade a step farther by crossing over to the pop world—landing on the cover of Rolling Stone, achieving pop hits, and starring in a series of Hollywood movies. Along the way, however, she ultimately lost much of her core country audience, to the point that in 1997 she dissolved her fan club, which had been one of the staunchest in country music. But Parton’s career—and her appeal to fans of hard country—was far from over. Beginning in 1999 she returned to the music of her youth and began rebuilding a tradition-minded fan base with a series of critically acclaimed bluegrass albums. (Country Music Hall of Fame)

… of Desi Arnaz Jr. Little Ricky is 55.

… of Katey Sagal. The Married…With Children mom is 54.

… of Paul Rodriguez, 53.

… of Patriots linebacker Junior Seau, 39.

… of Drea de Matteo. The actress who was whacked on The Sopranos is 35.

Paul Cezanne was born on this date in 1839. Click Cezanne painting of Chrysanthemums to enlarge.

Today is the birthday

… of Kevin Costner. Costner won the Oscars for director and best picture for Dances With Wolves and was nominated for the best actor Oscar for his portrayal of Lt. John Dunbar. He’s 53 today.

… of hockey hall-of-fame inductee Mark Messier. He’s 47.

… of Jesse L. Martin. The Law & Order star is 39.

It’s also the birthday of Cary Grant (Archibald Alexander Leach, 1904-1986) and Danny Kaye (David Daniel Kaminski, 1913-1987). Both won honorary Oscars though neither won the real thing; Grant had two nominations.

A.A. Milne was born on the date in 1882.

One of Milne’s friends had just started a new magazine for children, and asked him if he would contribute. He didn’t have any interest in writing children’s literature, even though his own son was three years old and just learning how to read. But during a holiday in Wales, he found himself trapped in the house during a rainstorm with nothing to do.

Milne said, “So there I was with an exercise-book and a pencil, and a fixed determination not to leave the heavenly solitude of that summer-house until it stopped raining … and there on the other side of the lawn was a child with whom I had lived for three years … and here within me unforgettable memories of my own childhood.”  So he began writing a series of poems, most of them addressed to his son, Christopher Robin. The poems were collected in his book When We Were Very Young (1924), which was a huge success. 

Around the same time, his son had begun playing with a group of stuffed animals named Pooh Bear, Piglet, Tigger, and Eeyore in the Ashdown forest near their house. Milne loved the idea that his son played with fake animals in a real forest. In his books Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928), he turned that forest into a magical place where there are no adults, but only Christopher Robin and his animal friends.

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

The first college basketball game with five players on a side was played on this date in 1896 at Iowa City, Iowa. The University of Chicago defeated the University of Iowa 15 to 12.

Today is the birthday

… of Betty White. The character actress, who first appeared on television in 1949, and most famous now for The Golden Girls, is 86. Miss White has been nominated for 15 Emmy Awards, winning four times.

… of Eartha Kitt. Santa’s Baby is 81.

… of James Earl Jones. The voice of Darth Vader is 77. Jones has been in more than 130 films and appeared on more than 50 television programs. He was nominated for the 1971 best actor Oscar for The Great White Hope.

… of long-time baseball coach Don Zimmer, now 77.

… of Muhammad Ali. The Champ is 66.

… of Bangle Susanna Hoffs, now 49.

… of Jim Carrey. The actor is 46.

… of Kid Rock. He’s 37.

… of Dwayne Wade. He’s 26.

And it’s the birthday of Al Capone, born in Naples, Italy, in 1899. Here’s some of the background from his obituary in The New York Times when he died in 1947 at the age of 48.

Alphonse (Scarface) Capone, the fat boy from Brooklyn, was a Horatio Alger hero–underworld version. More than any other one man he represented, at the height of his power from 1925 through 1931, the debauchery of the “dry” era. He seized and held in thrall during that period the great city of Chicago and its suburbs.

Head of the cruelest cutthroats in American history, he inspired gang wars in which more than 300 men died by the knife, the shotgun, the tommy gun and the pineapple, the gangster adaptation of the World War I hand grenade.

His infamy made international legend. In France, for example, he was “The One Who Is Scarred.” He was the symbol of the ultimate in American lawlessness.

Capone won great wealth; how much, no one will ever know, except that the figure was fantastic. He remained immune from prosecution for his multitudinous murders (including the St. Valentine Day Massacre in 1929 when his gunners, dressed as policemen, trapped and killed eight of the Bugs Moran bootleg outfit in a Chicago garage), but was brought to book, finally, on the comparatively sissy charge of evasion of income taxes amounting to around $215,000.

For this, he was sentenced to eleven years in Federal prison–serving first at Atlanta, then on The Rock, at Alcatraz–and was fined $50,000, with $20,000 additional for costs. With time out for good conduct, he finished this sentence in mid-January of 1939; but by then he was a slack- jawed paretic overcome by social disease, and paralytic to boot.

Billy Gray, the kid that befriended Klaatu in the classic 1951 sci-fi film The Day the Earth Stood Still, is 70 today. Billy’s old enough to play Professor Barnhardt this time around. Gray was Bud on the 50s sitcom Father Knows Best.

Richard Moll of Night Court is 65.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus is 47.

Patrick Dempsey is 42.

Orlando Bloom is 31.

“I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor; Believe me, honey, rich is better.”

Sophia Kalish was born at a farm house along the road in Russia as her mother was emigrating to America on this date in 1884. As Sophie Tucker she was one of the great stars of vaudeville, the Ziegfeld Follies and early movies. In the 1930s she brought elements of nostalgia for the early years of 20th century into her show. She was billed as “The Last of the Red Hot Mamas.” Her hearty sexual appetite was a frequent subject of her songs, unusual for female performers of the era.

In addition to her performing, Sophie Tucker was active in efforts to unionize professional actors, and was elected president of the American Federation of Actors in 1938.

From birth to age eighteen, a girl needs good parents. From eighteen to thirty-five, she needs good looks. From thirty-five to fifty-five, she needs a good personality. From fifty-five on, she needs good cash.

Sophie Tucker

The Library of Congress has more.

Today is the birthday

… of Ray Price. Still for the good times at 82.

When Ray Noble Price was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1996, many noted that the honor was long overdue. Such feelings weren’t based so much on the longevity of his career or on the number of major hits he has recorded, for in those regards Price was no different from many other deserving artists awaiting induction. More importantly, Price has been one of country’s great innovators. He changed the sound of country music from the late 1950s forward by developing a rhythmic brand of honky-tonk that has been hugely influential ever since. As steel guitarist Don Helms, a veteran of Hank Williams’s Drifting Cowboys once put it, “Ray Price created an era.” (Country Music Hall of Fame)

… of Glenn Yarbrough. He’s 78.

… of William Lee Golden. The big, bearded member, but not the bass voice, of the Oak Ridge Boys is 69.

… of Smokin’ Joe Frazier. The champ is 64.

… of Cynthia Robinson. She’s dancing to the music at 62.

You might like to hear the horns blowin’,
Cynthia on the throne, yeah!
Cynthia & Jerry got a message they’re sayin’:
[Cynthia:] All the squares, go home!

… of Kirstie Alley. She’s 57.

… of the most dangerous man in America, Rush Limbaugh. The audio-terrorist is 57.

… of Howard Stern. He’s 54.

… of broadcast journalist Christiane Amanpour. She’s 50.

… of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. The billionaire is 44.

Jack London was born in San Francisco on this date in 1876. London wrote more than 50 books, including The Call of the Wild and White Fang (1906). His most unforgettable story may be To Build a Fire. London died at age 40.

John Hancock was born on this date in 1737. Hancock was President of the Continental Congress of the United States of America in the summer of 1776. He was the first to sign the Declaration of Independence.